Do Women and Men Write About Love Differently?

In a recent essay in The New Yorker online's "Page-Turner" section called "The Ideal Marriage, According to Novels," author Adelle Waldman argues that there is a clear difference between the ways that men and women novelists write about love. Or, at least, men and women who pen literary fiction.

Women authors, Waldman suggests, depict love as a process of judging potential partners based on intelligence, intelligence of a specific kind: "The ideal mate, for Jane Austen's heroines, for Charlotte Brönte's, for George Eliot's, is someone intelligent enough to appreciate fully and respond deeply to their own intelligence, a partner for whom they feel not only desire but a sense of kinship, of intellectual and moral equality." In contrast, our most literarily lauded male writers "devote far less energy to considering the intelligence of their heroes' female love interests; instead, they tend to emphasize visceral attraction and feelings." A search for equality, she concludes, is a "much greater psychological driver" for female writers than it is for males.

Tolstoy's Kitty and Levin...

Waldman uses examples from only a handful of novels to explicate her argument—Eliot's Middlemarch, Austen's Sense and Sensibility, and Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan novels for the female side; Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, Saul Bellow's Herzog, Philip Roth's "The Professor of Desire," and Karl Ove Knausgaard's autobiographical Min kamp novels for the male—so it is easy to find exceptions to her gendered rule. She even calls attention such exceptions herself, at least from the male side (Samuel Richardson, Thomas Hardy, Jonathan Franzen, Norman Rush). Yet these are the exceptions, she argues, for "even those male writers who are most attentive to love and sex tend to direct their attention elsewhere—to the face, the body—and to personality only in a loose sense." In sum, male writers depict love "as a profound, mysterious attraction," while women writers prefer show love "as a partnership with a like soul, a person uniquely capable of understanding one's inner life."

...or Dorothea Brooke and Will Ladislaw?

Does Waldman's framework fall apart if we try to apply it to romance novels? Some romance novels are deeply invested in the vision of love as a meeting of the minds, the discovery of an intellectual soul mate, the finding of an equal. Others, though, lean far more toward the "love as a mysterious, inexplicable attraction" pole. Still others draw on both discourses, suggesting that the most successful relationships occur when both inexplicable attraction and intellectual compatibility coexist.

I think you would agree that examples of all three can be found in romance novels written by women. And, I would argue, those written by men.

A few questions that I have, then, after reading romance through the lens of Waldman's argument:

• Are literary writers more bound by gender conventions than are romance writers, at least when it comes to the depiction of love?

• Are female romance writers who focus primarily on "love as mysterious, inexplicable attraction" drawing their models from male literary writers?

• Are female romance writers who embrace the purportedly male model simply reclaiming a type vision of love that was, for socially constructed reasons (patriarchy, sexism), until recently only permitted to male novelists?

• Which vision of love is more empowering for women?

• Are both visions a fantasy of sorts? Or is one more realistic than the other?

• Which vision of love do you, as a reader, prefer to find in your romance novels?


Photo credits:
Anna Karenina: WomenArts
Middlemarch: Pinterest